Friday, February 12, 2016

Cut Along the Bias

In a new gender-blind study

a six-person team
of computer science researchers

looked at three million contributions
or "pull requests"

on the repository website GitHub

and found
that when the gender
of a contributor was unknown

a woman's code
was accepted 78.6 percent
of the time

while a man's
was accepted only 74.6 percent
of the time

though women
were more likely
to have their code rejected

when gender was revealed.

Though the results
have not yet been peer-reviewed

what might they indicate

about male politicians
Ted Cruz and Donald Trump

debating which of them
is more pro-restricting abortion rights

and simultaneously
more pro-woman
than the other?

Probably nothing.

This poem © 2016 Emily Cooper.